Volunteers build new Star Barn chapel at Freeland ranch

A 140-square-foot chapel now anchors the western-themed town at M-Bar-C Ranch in Freeland, replacing an old structure that had deteriorated so badly people feared it might blow down. Volunteers assembled, roofed, painted and decorated the new Star Barn chapel, and dozens of people turned out for the ribbon-cutting.

The chapel is a small addition on paper, but it sits inside a much larger volunteer-built experience that has long been aimed at Island County children and families. M-Bar-C Ranch covers 50 acres in Freeland and was bought in the 1970s by Seattle families who wanted a rural place where children could ride horses and thrive. Today, the ranch serves nearly 2,000 visitors a year from May through September, and a photo caption noted that about 2,500 children visit each year.

Inside the ranch’s mock frontier town, children dress in costumes, lock grownups in a pretend jail, visit a bank, shop at a general store and hotel, stop by a post office and gather around the chuck wagon kitchen. The new chapel adds another stop to that carefully built setting, one that reflects the ranch’s mix of play, service and volunteer labor. A 2023 report said the ranch has about 70 volunteers, and identified Merilou McNew as its longest-running volunteer.

The ranch’s name, M-Bar-C, was described in earlier coverage as short for Metropolitan Cowboys. The Forgotten Children’s Fund took over ownership of the ranch in 2001, but the property’s roots go back to the 1970s, when the site was developed as a place for children to experience horses, open land and a day built around imagination rather than screens or schedules. The ranch also has a year-round role in support of the nonprofit’s holiday work.

The Forgotten Children’s Fund traces its start to 1976, when a boy named Craig wrote a letter to Santa Claus that reached Dick Francisco at Francisco’s restaurant in Seattle. That same year, the group helped 285 children in 81 families. It now says it serves more than 2,900 children in 800 families each year across King, Lewis, Skagit, Snohomish, Whatcom and Chelan counties. The ranch has also served children with special needs, many of whom ride a horse for the first time there. For South Whidbey, the new chapel is less a standalone building than the latest sign of a long-running local effort to keep a one-of-a-kind place open to families who need it.